This article is an experimental effort of the Korean XO community. If you want to see the mesh network plan of OLPC, see Mesh_network.

Introduction

Because the IT infra of South Korea is quite well established compared to developing nations, it's rather easy for any OLPC (or its derivatives) to connect to the Internet regardless of their locations. However, we expect those 20,000,000+ OLPC and its derivative machines can establish a national-wide mesh network themselves. Therefore, there are two routes for each OLPC (or its derivative machine) to connect another, one via the current information highway of South Korea and the other via Korean Mesh Network, composed of more than 20,000,000 machines.

Those machines shall be connected each other horizontally and hierarchically using Moodle and wiki architecture.

Transmission Network

Relay/switch Network

Internet

MPLS

Networking

Every olpc laptop can communicate with other olpc latop or servers via Wifi, and servers communicate each other via Wimax.

Those networks can be classified under the kinds of educational facilities as below; kindergartens, primary schools, middle schools, high schools and colleges etc.

The hierarchical structure of OLPC network is as below.

School network

class server: it is a place for 20~50 children to save large files, to backup their daily activities, and to run various educational softwares (acitivities) which is too large to be on XO laptops. OLPC Korea estimates about 10~100 class servers shall compose a school network which is contolled by a xo korea/school server. Each class server has about 100 giga bytes hdd, 1 giga byte memory, and 1~2 Ghz cpu resources. As all Korean schools already have sufficient PCs, the only thing to do is to convert those Window XP machines to Linux servers, and it's quite easy work. It's basically with moodle, and the number of class servers is estimated to be about 500,000~600,000 units.

school server: it is the machine controlling class servers in each school, so there will be one school server per school. Like class servers, it also has Moodle on it, but somewhat different from that on class server; it provides adminstrative functions necessary to manage schools. Among class servers and/or school server, Wimax will be used to link each other. Settings and codes for school servers are described below.

local server: it is to manage school servers in an area with about 100,000 populations (시 군 구).

wide area server: it is to manage local servers in an area with about 5,000,000 populations (광역자치단체)

Governmental network

community server: it is a place for 20~50 citizens to save large files, to backup their daily activities, and to run various educational softwares (acitivities) which is too large to be on XO laptops for citizens, Larger OLPC. OLPC Korea estimates about 10~100 community servers shall compose a county network which is contolled by a county server. It's role is similar to that of class server, but for citizens rather than children.

county server (읍면동): it is the machine controlling community servers in county.

local server (시군구): it is to manage county servers in an area with about 100,000 populations.

wide area server (광역자치단체): it is to manage local servers in an area with about 5,000,000 populations (광역자치단체)

Business network

According to UNSPSC (United Nations Standard Product & Service Classification), OLPC Korea will provide server architectures for business sectors. It will be managed under national wide scale rather than local aspects; that is, there are only one business server in Korea with regional communities in it.

School server & its derivatives

Because schools (even kindergartens also) in South Korea are all connected to the Internet now and provided of stable electricity 24hrs/365days, composing a network (stand-alone or not) is quite easy.

However, because we hope school servers to connect to (an)other school servers directly with or without using current cable networks, and because we hope OLPC and its derivatives be supplied to not only schools but other organizations also, we also make some derivatives of school servers suggested by the OLPC foundation.

There will be various types of servers in South Korea, ranging from a server for only one person to that for 1,000 persons.